Intro

Success for any business means staying relevant to existing customers while also attracting new ones. One of New Zealand’s largest stock exchange listed companies, Spark New Zealand (formerly Telecom NZ) understands this better than most. Having undergone a huge transformation and rebranding exercise in 2014, Spark NZ is moving beyond being a fixed line telco to a leading edge business delivering the latest digital technologies and experiences.

Challenge

While the rebranding exercise has been the most publicly visible and highly talked about element of this transformation, so much more needs to go on behind the scenes to make the vision a reality. Spark’s renewed focus on their customers, understanding the digital experience and being able to respond accordingly is essential to their overall strategy.

“We were facing a common situation where an individual component (e.g. a server) was reporting that things were ok when users were experiencing application performance issues”, says Graham Prowse, Assure Manager, Change & Technology at Spark New Zealand. While we had various system monitoring tools in place previously, we were essentially blind to the end-to-end customer experience.

“As part of the overall transformation to Spark New Zealand, the customer is at the heart of all we do. We knew we needed to change the way we were monitoring systems and processes to look at the entire digital journey.”

“We knew we needed to change the way we were monitoring systems and processes to look at the entire digital journey.”

Solution

After reviewing multiple vendors, Spark New Zealand decided that Dynatrace was the best fit for their organization.

“Our goal is to be more proactive in our approach to service management. We needed to move away from monitoring individual applications and start to manage and monitor key customer journeys with the clear understanding that customer experience is paramount”, Prowse says.

Working with the local Dynatrace team, Spark developed custom dashboards that provided business executives and stakeholders with a level of visibility and understanding into their customers like never before.

“We chose Dynatrace for a number of reasons. In particular, measures around user experience management have senior management labeling Dynatrace a ‘game changer’.”

“We chose Dynatrace for a number of reasons. In particular, measures around user experience management have senior management labeling Dynatrace a ‘game changer’.”

Benefits

There is a large team at Spark using Dynatrace everyday, which has proved critical to the successful infrastructure rollout underpinning Sparks rebranding efforts. Issues that may have gone unnoticed are being quickly identified. The team has realized a 20-30% reduction in mean time to repair and has seen significant cost savings by reducing manual effort and rationalizing the IT systems.

The ability Dynatrace has to proactively monitor customer journeys and resolve performance issues before they effect customer satisfaction has become integral to Sparks new brand promise and business priorities.

“With Dynatrace, we can now accurately see what the end user is experiencing and share information with the relevant executives in a meaningful way. The insights are not only supporting our business strategy, but also helping to define it as we quickly identify what really matters to the customer.”

“We’ve been able to move beyond generic systems performance reporting to providing executives, like our Retail Marketing team, with information such as offer redemption at an individual customer level. This is something they’ve never had internal access to before.”

It’s this kind of unexpected benefits that have really grabbed the attention of senior management. Knowing that they’ve barely scratched the surface of what Dynatrace can do, Spark is excited about the opportunities it will provide to take their customer service to the next level and drive their business forward.

"The insights are not only supporting our business strategy, but also helping to define it as we quickly identify what really matters to the customer.”